# Amazon MSK broker types
MSK Provisioned offers two broker types - Standard and Express. Standard brokers give you the most flexibility to configure your clusters, while Express brokers offer more elasticity, throughput, resilience, and ease-of-use for running high performance streaming applications.
See the following topics for more details about each offering. The following table also highlights the key feature comparison between Standard and Express brokers.
| Feature | Standard broker | Express broker |
| --- | --- | --- |
| [Storage Management](msk-storage-management.md) | Customer managed (Features include EBS storage, Tiered storage, Provisioned storage throughput, Auto-scaling, Storage capacity alerts) | Fully MSK managed |
| [Supported instances](broker-instance-sizes.md) | T3, M5, M7g | M7g |
| [Sizing and scaling considerations](bestpractices-intro.md) | Throughput, connections, partitions, storage | Throughput, connections, partitions |
| [Broker scaling](msk-update-broker-count.md) | Vertical and horizontal scaling | Vertical and horizontal scaling |
| [Kafka versions](kafka-versions.md) | See [Apache Kafka versions](kafka-versions.md) | Starts at version 3.6 |
| [Apache Kafka Configuration](msk-configuration.md) | More configurable | Mostly MSK managed for higher resilience |
| [Security](security.md) | Encryption, Private/Public access, Authentication & Authorization - IAM, SASL/SCRAM, mTLS, plaintext, Kafka ACLs | Encryption, Private/Public access, Authentication & Authorization - IAM, SASL/SCRAM, mTLS, plaintext, Kafka ACLs |
| [Monitoring](monitoring.md) | CloudWatch, Open Monitoring | CloudWatch, Open Monitoring |
**Note**
You can't change an MSK Provisioned cluster from a Standard broker type to an Express broker type by switching the broker type using the MSK API. You have to create a new cluster with the desired broker type (Standard or Express).
**Topics**
+ [Amazon MSK Standard brokers](msk-broker-types-standard.md)
+ [Amazon MSK Express brokers](msk-broker-types-express.md)
# Amazon MSK Standard brokers
Standard brokers for MSK Provisioned offer the most flexibility to configure your cluster's performance. You can choose from a wide range cluster configurations to achieve the availability, durability, throughput, and latency characteristics required for your applications. You can also provision storage capacity and increase it as needed. Amazon MSK handles the hardware maintenance of Standard brokers and attached storage resources, automatically repairing hardware issues that may arise. You can find more details in this document about various topics related to Standard brokers, including topics on [storage management](msk-storage-management.md), [configurations](msk-configuration-standard.md), and [maintenance](patching-impact.md#patching-standard-brokers).
# Amazon MSK Express brokers
Express brokers for MSK Provisioned make Apache Kafka simpler to manage, more cost-effective to run at scale, and more elastic with the low latency you expect. Brokers include pay-as-you-go storage that scales automatically and requires no sizing, provisioning, or proactive monitoring. Depending on the instance size selected, each broker node can provide up to 3x more throughput per broker, scale up to 20x faster, and recover 90% quicker compared to standard Apache Kafka brokers. Express brokers come pre-configured with Amazon MSK’s best practice defaults and enforce client throughput quotas to minimize resource contention between clients and Kafka’s background operations.
Here are some key factors and capabilities to consider when using Express brokers.
+ **No storage management**: Express brokers eliminate the need to [provision or manage any storage resources](msk-storage-management.md). You get elastic, virtually unlimited, pay-as-you-go, and fully managed storage. For high throughput use cases, you do not need to reason about the interactions between compute instances and storage volumes, and the associated throughput bottlenecks. These capabilities simplify cluster management and eliminate storage management operational overhead.
+ **Faster scaling**: Express brokers allow you to scale your cluster and move partitions up to 20x faster than on Standard brokers. This capability is crucial when you need to scale out your cluster to handle upcoming load spikes or scale in your cluster to reduce cost. See the sections on [expanding your cluster](msk-update-broker-count.md), [removing brokers](msk-remove-broker.md), [reassigning partitions](msk-update-broker-type.md), and [setting up LinkedIn’s Cruise Control for rebalancing](cruise-control.md) for more details on scaling your cluster.
+ **Higher throughput**: Express brokers offer up to 3x more throughput per broker than Standard brokers. For example, you can safely write data at up to 500 MBps with each m7g.16xlarge sized Express broker compared to 153.8 MBps on the equivalent Standard broker (both numbers assume sufficient bandwidth allocation towards background operations, such as replication and rebalancing).
+ **Configured for high resilience**: Express brokers automatically offer various best practices to improve your cluster’s resilience. These include guardrails on critical Apache Kafka configurations, throughput quotas, and capacity reservations for background operations and unplanned repairs. These capabilities make it safer and easier to run large scale Apache Kafka applications. See the sections on [Express broker configurations](msk-configuration-express.md) and [Amazon MSK Express broker quota](limits.md#msk-express-quota) for more details.
+ **No Maintenance windows**: There are no maintenance windows for Express brokers. Amazon MSK automatically updates your cluster hardware on an ongoing basis. See [Patching for Express brokers](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/msk/latest/developerguide/patching-impact.html#patching-express-brokers) for more details.
## Additional information about Express brokers
+ Express brokers work with Apache Kafka APIs, but don't yet fully support KStreams API.
+ Express brokers are only available in a 3AZs configuration.
+ Express brokers are only available on select instance sizes. See [Amazon MSK pricing](https://aws.amazon.com/msk/pricing/) for the updated list.
+ Express brokers are supported on the following Apache Kafka versions: 3.6, 3.8, and 3.9.
+ Express brokers can be created with KRaft mode from Apache Kafka version 3.9 onwards.
**See these blogs**
For more information about MSK Express brokers and to see a real-world example of Express brokers in use, read the following blogs:
[Introducing Express brokers for Amazon MSK to deliver high throughput and faster scaling for your Kafka clusters](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-express-brokers-for-amazon-msk-to-deliver-high-throughput-and-faster-scaling-for-your-kafka-clusters/)
[Express brokers for Amazon MSK: Turbo-charged Kafka scaling with up to 20 times faster performance](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/express-brokers-for-amazon-msk-turbo-charged-kafka-scaling-with-up-to-20-times-faster-performance/)
This blog demonstrates how Express brokers:
Provide faster throughput, rapid scaling, and improved recovery time from failures
Eliminate storage management complexities